I think hiring SRE makes sense. I think hiring 'platform engineers' makes sense. People still do that, and will, as far as I know, far into to the future.
...but I think hiring devops means you never understood, even vaguely, what devops was; you're just using a buzz word in your job ad.
This. I see ads for DevOps roles as a signal that “this org doesn’t get it”.
DevOps is about people and culture. Your teams embrace automation, fail fast, lean — all the good stuff. DevOps is about concrete business outcomes. Not Ansible or bazel.
> hiring devops means you never understood, even vaguely, what devops was; you're just using a buzz word in your job ad.
I honestly don't get this thread and the complaining. Yes, I was one of those empowered engineers at an org that did ALL of the DevOps. But do ya'll seriously think you don't sometimes need people who do ONLY DevOps? Cause I can tell you there are absolutely orgs that deploy dozens, if not hundreds of servers sometimes by region and in those cases you absolutely do need full time DevOps engineers to tune, configure, and deploy these fleets. And yea it's a full time job just to do that.
Correct, except generally they aren’t even good at ops. They tend to know a highly specific slice, or how to operate an abstraction. But troubleshooting Linux? Good luck.
A regurgitation of Sysadmins that knew some scripting?
Cloud Native Sysadmins?
Patrick Dubois said "a systems administrator working with an Agile mindset", and this guy started DevOps Days; which is where we get the term.
The "merged teams" spiel is from the "10+ Deploys a day" talk from Flickr, and it's but one definition of what devops means.
This is why I personally consider it failed, it's meaningless because it means different things to different people. You can never "do it wrong" if you don't even have a definition that everyone agrees on.
> Devops is when you have developers who are empowered.
That’s just half true. If something doesn’t work in production, guess who can get mysql production logs? Not the developers. Can you access production dbs (not that that’s the way to fix things, but I have seen that in many orgs)? Nop. And if there’s anything you can do yourself (like changing things via TF files), you’ll need to wait until the gatekeepers approve your request.
The gatekeeper are usually called platform engineers.
But in any case, I don’t want all that power (and responsibility) either if it does not come with an increased compensation.
What parent commenter says that when you have "devops", there are no such gatekeepers.
I always got higher compensation in such companies/teams, because they weren't dying. At least, when I joined :) They needed efficiency instead of control and keeping salaries down.
That's not devops.
Devops is when you have developers who are empowered.
When you hire someone specifically to do devops you are hiring an ops team and calling it devops.
So, yeah. That still happens, sure. However, I do think it's changing these days:
linkedin > connections -> control-F -> 'devops' => 0 hits
"Site Reliability Engineer" -> 10 hits
I think hiring SRE makes sense. I think hiring 'platform engineers' makes sense. People still do that, and will, as far as I know, far into to the future.
...but I think hiring devops means you never understood, even vaguely, what devops was; you're just using a buzz word in your job ad.